In many modern data processing systems, such as active and passive sonar systems, radar systems, communications systems and ultrasound instrumentation systems, sensors are used to receive information for processing and/or analysis by the system. For example, active sonar systems project a beam-like sound wave signal into the water, and an object that is in the path of the signal reflects a portion of the signal back to sensors, such as hydrophones. The signal reflected back to the sonar is detected by the sensors and thereafter utilized by the sonar to locate the object in the water. One conventional sonar system includes a projector that projects a sound wave signal s(t) into the water. Portions of the signal projected from the projector are reflected from the object to a lower receiver and an upper receiver in the form of an echo signal. And from the echo signal, the sonar system can determine various attributes of the object, such as a vertical arrival angle that partially defines the position of the object with respect to the sonar system.
As is typical, many of these modern data processing systems include one or more arrays of many sensors, or receiver elements, such as eighty-eight receiver elements, with each of the receiver elements requiring its own analog conditioning electronics and analog-to-digital converter. Further, digital signal processing is typically required for the receiver elements. In this regard, data from the array of sensors are received by the system in such a manner that all elements from a single time sample are grouped together. But to process the data, most conventional systems require the data to first be organized by each element across all time samples. As such, the data must be reordered, “corner turned” or transposed, before the system can process the data.
In conventional sonar systems, for example, the digital signal processing or portions thereof is performed by hardware circuitry, or special purpose software running on arrays of digital signal processing devices. Whereas such hardware and special purpose software adequately perform the digital signal processing required, each method has drawbacks. In this regard, conventional sonar systems are often deployed on watercraft, such as unmanned undersea vehicles, and in some cases the resources associated with the watercraft, such as space, power, weight and processing capability, are limited. Thus, the inclusion of the digital processing circuitry can be prohibitive. With respect to digital processing special purpose software, the need to corner turn the data, which is memory input/output (I/O) intensive, slows down the digital processing because no computations are performed during corner turning. That is, data are simply moved from one location to another in preparation for processing at a next stage.